Shahed Jaber studied pharmacy at the University of Jordan between 2012 and 2016 - not because she wanted to fill prescriptions, but because she wanted to understand the system those prescriptions depend on. By the time she graduated, she had a clearer diagnosis than most of her classmates: the problem wasn't the drugs. It was how they moved.
After stints as a research assistant and a quality control analyst at MS Pharma, and a brief educator role at Abbott, Jaber had seen enough of the supply chain from the inside to know it was fundamentally broken. Hospitals couldn't easily reach distributors. Pharmacies were manually chasing suppliers. Manufacturers had no real-time visibility into demand. The MENA region's healthcare procurement system was, in practical terms, running on spreadsheets and phone calls.
In 2016 - the same year he finished his degree - Jaber co-founded Aumet alongside Yahya Aqel and Adel Haddad. The ambition was direct: build a B2B marketplace that connected every node in the healthcare supply chain, from manufacturer to distributor to pharmacy to hospital, across the Arab world.
Healthcare procurement in MENA has been broken for decades. We're building the infrastructure that changes that.
- Shahed Jaber, Co-Founder, Aumet IncBut Jaber wasn't done founding things. In 2017, she launched UniOrders - a focused B2B marketplace connecting drugstores with pharmacies. Think of it as a tighter, faster experiment running parallel to Aumet's larger thesis. UniOrders grew, found traction, and in October 2020 was acquired by Aumet - the company Jaber had co-founded four years earlier. She came back in through the acquisition as Marketplace Manager, then moved into the Product Manager role in early 2021.
There's a particular kind of clarity that comes from building a startup specifically to solve the problem you first identified inside a larger one you already built. That's the Jaber story: two companies, one thesis, one acquisition, one team. The pharmacist and the founder were always the same person.
Aumet now powers 80% of the Jordanian pharmacy market, serves 32 hospitals and 500 medical centers, and has deployed across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the UAE - with 156 employees across four continents.
The platform's model is straightforward in principle and technically demanding in practice. Aumet aggregates bulk orders from healthcare providers to extract discounted prices from manufacturers. It connects pharmacies with suppliers in real-time, manages inventory through AI, and maintains a live index of over 50,000 manufacturers. The demand forecasting engine identifies potential drug shortages before they materialize. The procurement workflows that once required days of manual negotiation now run automatically.
By May 2026, Aumet had closed a $12 million Series A led by Emkan Capital, with Qatar Development Bank, SABAH VC, AAIC, Shorooq Partners, and - crucially - Cigalah Group and Salehiya Trading Company as investors. The last two are among the actual healthcare distributors the platform serves. When the people you're disrupting write your funding check, something is working.
Indexed in the Aumet AI platform
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, UAE
Across 4 continents
Using Aumet's procurement platform
Aumet is, at its core, a procurement operating system for healthcare. Pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics use it to order medical supplies. Distributors and manufacturers use it to receive those orders, manage demand signals, and coordinate logistics. The AI layer predicts what's about to run out before anyone runs out.
The MENA healthcare supply chain before Aumet looked something like this: a pharmacy manager would check stock manually, call three or four distributors to compare prices and availability, wait for callbacks, process orders via email or WhatsApp, and reconcile invoices by hand. For hospitals, multiply that by a hundred different product categories. For national health systems, multiply again.
Aumet replaces that entire workflow. The platform aggregates demand across its 12,000+ pharmacy network, which means individual pharmacies automatically get access to bulk pricing that would otherwise require enterprise-scale purchasing power. The AI forecasting engine doesn't just respond to stockouts - it anticipates them days or weeks ahead, using historical data, seasonal patterns, and real-time supply signals.
The $1 billion in gross merchandise volume that has moved through the platform isn't a vanity metric. It's evidence that the manual system it replaced was genuinely that large, and genuinely that inefficient. Every dollar that flows through Aumet instead of through a phone call is a step toward a healthcare supply chain that actually works.
Jaber's insight - as the pharmacist who saw both sides of the transaction - was that the problem wasn't willful inefficiency. Nobody chose to run pharmaceutical procurement on spreadsheets. It was simply that no one had built the infrastructure to do it differently. That's what Aumet is: infrastructure. And infrastructure, once embedded, doesn't leave.